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MUSIC
Slowdive ★★★★½
Enmore Theatre, July 21
What does it mean to feel nostalgia for a song released before you were even born?
Enmore Theatre is at capacity for Slowdive’s first show in Sydney since 2018, after cancelling their scheduled set at Daydream festival back in April due to injury.
Slowdive are one of the progenitors of shoegaze.Credit: Rhett Wyman
The crowd at the Enmore is varied: grey-haired guys in Pink Floyd T-shirts, baby-faced teens still wearing braces, and at least one dude in speed dealers lighting up the moment the lights went down.
This is the strangeness of Slowdive. The influential shoegaze band broke through in the early 90s, and broke up soon after. Almost two decades later, in 2014, they got back together, and released Slowdive in 2017, their most successful album.
They’re not the first band to break up and get back together, or to find a new audience over time. But it is unusual how easily they have reached over that divide –1995’s Pygmalion might have been made this year, and Slowdive in 1991. The strange alchemy of their songwriting hasn’t just stood the test of time, but defied its logic. It has also influenced countless other acts, including Beach House, Deerhunter and Tame Impala.
Slowdive broke up for almost 20 years, before triumphantly returning to the scene in 2014.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Their setlist on Friday moves back and forth through the years, no one era favoured. But that’s not to say Slowdive has not grown or changed. The gritty Avalyn builds intensely – it is beautiful, melancholic and near-deafening. And then there is Star Roving, which draws on those grittier elements and reassembles them into something dreamier. Even the subtlety of these shifts suggest songs that belong on one continuum.
In a 2015 Pitchfork documentary, singer and guitarist Neil Halstead said it always made sense to him that teens “got” Slowdive. Hearing Sugar for the Pill (“this jealousy will break the whole”), Catch the Breeze (“rain, washes, ways down”), kisses (“taking all the ghosts, the hurt”), it’s easy to see what he means. There is the angst, the catastrophe of heartbreak, the pairing of the celestial with ennui – storms, hauntings, stars and woundedness. It may sometimes feel like music for teens, but it respects the complexity of those experiences – so that it still has a place in your record collection decades later.
Maybe that’s part of why their music has endured. And that’s how you end up with a crowd of people born 30 years apart, experiencing the same nostalgia, and screaming “I love you” at the stage.
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